Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for the presentation.

On the Dormant Accounts Fund, has the Minister of State any idea of the unallocated funds? There is the reserve. Putting that aside, there are funds that have been allocated but have not been spent for which one must make a contingency. Then there are the unallocated funds. Has the Minister of State any idea where those stand at at present?

On the Dormant Accounts Fund, how much of the money is now being spent directly by agencies such as the HSE and how much of it is going to community and voluntary groups around the country? My understanding of the Dormant Accounts Acts is that the funding must be for social and economic disadvantage, educational disadvantage and disability. I am curious as to whether there has been a little quiet mainstreaming in replacement of what should be Exchequer funding out of the Dormant Accounts Fund. The fund was always meant to be for the community and voluntary sector and special issues, not for substituting State funding. We saw the same happen with the lottery funds. Those were all meant to be additional funding and then, slowly but surely, they replaced the Exchequer funding. If I asked a number of Ministers how much of their funding was from the national lottery, they would not know from their Estimates unless they started digging into the DNA. It is merely a matter of them having this amount of funding and they negotiate it with the Department of Finance as per usual. The Dormant Accounts Fund was different because it used to come back to the Minister. I do not know if that still happens. Every project comes back to the Minister for approval around a committee. It is where the Minister sits and looks at the ceiling and states that he or she agrees or otherwise with this or that. It is all done in a process but it used be done by a committee. The Minister of State might also confirm if that is still the situation.